Transitions to Adulthood: Education, Skills, and Labour Market Outcomes in Madagascar and Senegal: This project under the lead of David E. Sahn (CERDI, Cornell University) will analyse long-term longitudinal data from Madagascar and Senegal to examine the dynamics of transitions into workforce of a cohort of young men and women. The team of researchers will rely on achievement test score data collected in early childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, as well as measures of non-cognitive skills among the young adults, to explore the links between education duration and quality, skills and family background, and subsequent labour market outcomes. Additionally, using detailed information on parental backgrounds as well as on economic and health events during childhood, the team will investigate the extent to which these factors condition young people’s well-being in adulthood, and in particular, the mechanisms through which poverty persists across generations.
The team will use longitudinal data on cohorts of youth from Madagascar and Senegal that were initially tested in school in second grade, then interviewed at age 13-16 and finally reinterviewed at age 21-24, in late fall 2011. The unusually long duration of the panel, the detailed year-by-year event histories, and the specialized nature of the surveys will enable us to overcome the limitations affecting most previous work on these issues in Africa. The project team will be able to estimate the determinants of the timing and occurrence of behaviours, particularly leaving school and entering the labour market, as well as related behaviours such as migration, marriage, and childbearing.
The study is broadly designed to impact living standards in Africa by providing guidance to policymakers, donor agencies, and non-governmental organizations on policies to improve the possibilities for young people, especially women, to lead productive lives, and to reduce the persistence of poverty from one generation to the next. More specifically, the aim is to increase the knowledge of the process of skills accumulation, and their impacts and determinants in low income settings in multiple ways.
David E. Sahn argued, that among the most salient of their findings is that, personality appears to affect labour market outcomes, the policy implications of this finding are not precise enough to make a statement if personality cannot be affected by external influences. Using information on the sample individuals’ maternal and paternal grandparents as well as on childhood homes and parental characteristics, the project can begin to dissect how much of the personality traits can be explained through genetics, how much through environment, and how much through the interaction between the two.
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B. Kelsey Jack and Felix Masiye (Tufts University, University of Zambia) put their research focus on the situation in Zambia. The project “Food Constraints, Yield Uncertainty and “Ganyu” Labour” examines the situation for Small-scale farming. The aim is to identify the causal impact of short-term labour in the farming sector. The work within the project will conduct a cluster randomized controlled trial in Zambia’s Eastern Province. As part of the trial, randomly selected clusters of households will be provided with access to loans of either cash or maize during the farming season. Conceptually, maize loans have three main advantages over cash loans: first, this allows to directly address the lack of food as primary reason for external labour supply named by farmers in focus groups; second, the team of the project conjectures that the provision of maize will lower the likelihood of additional resources being used for conspicuous consumption; and third, the team expects default rates on maize loans to be substantially lower due to the wide availability and observability of stored maize at the end of the harvesting season. The comparison of the cash and maize loan programmes with respect to repayment rates, labour supply and total economic outcomes will allow the team to assess the importance of the in-kind nature of the credit.
The main objective of the maize loan intervention and the main scope of the project is to identify the degree to which short term credit constraints affect farming households’ labour supply choices in the short-run, and the degree to which these effects translate into lower farm productivity and yields in the medium- or the long-run. Two stages of intervention will be implemented. In the first phase of the proposed intervention (year I), maize loans will be offered to a selected group of farmers without prior announcement in the middle of the agricultural season (January). This first intervention will allow the team to estimate the short-term effects of loosening existing credit constraints on labour supply and agricultural productivity. Since all major farming decisions (area of cultivation, crops planted) are already in place at the time of the intervention, the primary adjustments the team expects to see is an increase in on-farm labour supply.
In the second phase of the intervention (year II), the loan programme will be announced to selected farmers prior to the initiation of field work (September), which will allow the project team to directly investigate the degree to which anticipated credit constraints affect the production plan chosen by farms in terms of plot size and crop mix. The team of researchers will observe how farmers adjust on the extensive margin, through changes to the area of cultivation and to the types of crops planted. Regular measurement of wages within the study villages and on neighbouring large farms will help to identify the general labour market impacts of the intervention.
Kelsey Jack addressed the question if seasonal incomes and capital market frictions lower agricultural productivity. Jack mentioned, that short run loans increase agricultural productivity. They allow for substitution away from consumption smoothing strategies like fewer meals and off-farm labour. She concluded, that availability of short run loans are potentially leading to substantial welfare gains for households.
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Taryn Dinkelman and Grace Kumchulesi (Dartmouth College, University of Malawi) focus their research on the project “Labour migration and structural change in rural labour markets: Evidence from Malawi”. The project collates, digitizes and uses individual-level and aggregate Census data from the 1940s through 1990s to investigate whether these large migration flows and corresponding cash inflows through deferred pay schemes affected the employment patterns of men and women over the long term. It will be important whether women worked more in the wake of male outmigration, or whether remittances enabled them to work less. The census data will allow the evaluation of typically male and female jobs (type of employer, occupation and industry) and whether they have changed in response to labour migration.
In addition to collecting Census data for the quantitative analysis administrative data on the location of mine recruiting stations in Malawi will be collected to measure which areas were easy to migrate away from. Additionally, mining records on the flows of remittances back to Malawi in each year will be used to capture the new access to capital that rural economies could exploit. And, available agricultural input and output data will be digitalized and used to investigate whether labour migration had negative effects on farm yields or positive impacts on farming.
One of the key questions in development economics is how poor rural areas transition from homogenous, agricultural economies to more diverse and modern economies. Taryn Dinkelman addressed in her presentation whether labour exports can unleash capital accumulation which are required to start reallocation of labour across sectors. For example, part of the research question will be to ask whether remittance flows (that vary over space and time in the opposite direction to male outflows) facilitated the shift of women into the labour force and of men into non-farm work, and whether specific skills accumulated through mine work in different periods may have assisted in these shifts.
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Asim Khwaja (Harvard Kennedy School) and Jacob N. Shapiro (Princeton University) work together on the project “Punjab Economic Opportunity Program: Evaluating markets for skill acquisition and employment” in Pakistan which focuses on skills development in low-income countries (LICs).The project supports the Punjab Economic Opportunities Programme (PEOP) a DfID funded programme being implemented in Punjab, Pakistan, that gathers comprehensive household, employer, trainer and market-level data in order to establish the current level of skill acquisition and take stock of skill mismatches and obstacles faced by individuals in acquiring skills, trainers and employers in providing skills, and employers in effectively utilizing these skills.
The evaluations will be carried out through randomized controlled trials to ensure rigorous and empirically sound results. The project aims to identify skill shortages and mismatches and evaluate the impact of skills provision on labour market outcomes as well as examine how these outcomes vary by trainee age, gender and urban versus rural location. It is also important to examine how skill training supply can be made to respond better to market demands, and to learn about which approaches best encourage skill formation and deployment in both employment and self-employment opportunities.
The activities have focused mainly on three activities from the PEOP project portfolio: Skills for Jobs (SFJ), which studies issues related to skills training targeted at urban men; Skills for Market (SFM), which studies skills training provision for rural women; and ‘big push’, which will study the impacts of providing training to entire rural economic value chains.
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Nina Pavcnik and Brian Mc Caig (Dartmouth College, Wilfrid Laurier University) work together on the project “Structural change, international trade, and labour markets in a low-income country: Evidence from Vietnam”. The first part of this project will examine the consequences of export opportunities induced by the U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) on the employment and productivity of enterprises in Vietnam using the longitudinal Enterprise Survey that spans the period of trade reform.
The project will first analyse how declines in export costs affect employment across heterogeneous firms and the contribution of incumbents and new entrants, such as foreign-invested firms, toward employment growth. In addition, it will examine the channels through which the BTA might have increased aggregate industry productivity: the reallocation of labour and market shares to high productivity firms, the entry of initially highly productive firms (e.g., foreign-invested enterprises), and within-firm productivity improvements. Combined with the completed and ongoing work, the proposed research will provide a fuller picture of the microeconomic mechanisms through which export opportunities stimulate jobs and productivity in the enterprise sector in a low-income country.
The second part of the project will contribute to the scarce literature on this topic and use the longitudinal component of nationally representative household survey data that covers all sectors (including agriculture and services) and employment in all employers (including self-employment) to analyse transitions of individuals and household businesses between the household business and enterprise sectors over almost a decade of a structural change (2002-2008). In sum, the household datasets thus allow the project to follow individuals over time, follow businesses over time, and to match the business to the most knowledgeable household member for most years. This is a very rich dataset in comparison to data available in most low-income countries.
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Supreet Kaur and Emily Breza (Columbia University, Columbia Business School) work on their project “Wage Compression in Low Income Labour Markets” which concentrates on the labour market situation in India. The project aims to create a baseline survey to capture the previous wage and employment history of each worker. Then teams will be randomized into treatment groups. In addition, the results will provide insight on whether distortions from norms can be mitigated by firm policies. The information treatments vary whether workers are provided with a justification for the reason for wage dispersion. The testing is about whether effort distortions are lower when information about team member is also revealed. The implications of wage compression on employment and firm output are potentially substantial, and have policy relevance.
In addition, if there is wage compression, a shift from informal casual labour arrangements to formal full-time employment could actually hurt workers and reduce firm output and profits. The researchers will engage with organizations that have bearing on policy, such as the World Bank PREM unit and with policymakers in LICs, to solicit input on the study design.
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Simon Franklin (University of Oxford), Stefano Caria (University of Oxford) presented their project "The Effect of Information Provision and Transport Vouchers in Addis Ababa". Addis Ababa is an ideal place to study the costs of job search. Ethiopia is currently enjoying impressive economic growth; however, Addis Ababa still has large numbers of urban unemployed. The foremost aim of this study is to estimate the impact of the job search interventions on the probability of transitioning from joblessness to employment. Further, by comparing the impacts of the treatments the project seeks to uncover whether it is a lack of information about job opportunities, or more generally lack of access to the city that creates the most significant search costs. This should shed light on the appropriateness of different policies to improve access to jobs for the unemployed in large Ethiopian and other African cities.
The project proposes a novel randomized Control Trial to evaluate two different policies to lower search costs for prospective workers: (i) the provision of transport vouchers and (ii) the provision of information about vacancies. Reduced search costs allow job seekers to increase overall search intensity and to raise reservation wages, leading to changes in the probability of employment and in the likely characteristics of jobs found. It will thus be investigated whether the impacts of the programmes are on both the individual search choices and on the labour market outcomes. The project will also measure spillovers to untreated individuals through social interaction and competition for jobs.
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Isaac Mbiti and Joan Harmony Hicks (Southern Methodist University, University of California – Berkeley) work on the project “Start-up capital for youth: Assessing the potential of small business grants and vocational training in Kenya” to provide better labour market conditions for young adults. The proposed project, Start-up Capital for Youth (SCY), will compare and contrast the relative efficacy of providing vocational training and small business start-up grants in Kenya. SCY will build on an earlier randomized evaluation of a vocational training voucher programme in Kenya that included nearly 2,200 young people. In the previous programme, a random half of programme participants were awarded a voucher that covered the cost of vocational training. SCY will support the analysis of the near-term impacts of vocational training, including an evaluation of the differential returns between private and public training and the impacts of training. Furthermore, this project will support an additional intervention which will randomly select half of the voucher winners and half of the non-winners to receive an unconditional cash grant that is sufficient to purchase toolkits or provide seed capital for their entrepreneurial ventures.
The randomized cross-cutting design of this project will allow the project to simultaneously estimate the impacts of vocational training, start-up grants, and the combination of both interventions. The use of randomization in treatment assignment will circumvent concerns about selection bias and confounding factors. Furthermore, detailed longitudinal data (the Kenya Life Panel Survey) covering nearly 15 years is available on all program participants, which will enable the exploration of heterogeneous treatment effects on different sub-populations in the sample. This panel data will also allow the team to closely examine the dynamics and patterns of youth employment outcomes. In addition to providing rigorous evidence on the near-term and medium to long term returns to vocational training for young African adults, a key contribution of this project will be to provide some of the first experimental evidence on the complementarities between vocational education and financial capital in Africa, by combining randomized interventions with high-quality longitudinal data.
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Pamela Jakiela and Owen Ozier (University of Maryland, World Bank) examine the situation for young women in Nairobi within their project “Girls Empowerment by Microfranchising: Estimating the Impacts of Microfranchising on Young Women in Nairobi”. They propose to evaluate the second wave of the Girls Empowered by Microfranchise (GEM) Project, to be implemented by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in 2013. The IRC is experienced in youth employment programmes—having pioneered microfranchising in Sierra Leone—and has received funding for up to 525 young women in three Nairobi slums to participate in the second wave of the GEM programme.
The proposed evaluation estimates the impact of the IRC’s microfranchising programme on young women’s labour supply, income and expenditures, savings, empowerment and self-actualization, and overall well-being. Their proposed design allows for a comparison between the IRC’s microfranchising intervention and both a pure control group – who receive no entrepreneurial support – and a traditional cash grant treatment which provides capital but no entrepreneurial guidance or business plan.
The design also allows them to estimate spillover effects on pre-existing businesses. This novel aspect of their design addresses a major concern in evaluations of entrepreneurship and credit interventions. Estimates of direct effects may overstate overall social impacts if new enterprises adversely affect the profits of existing firms. To explore this question, the team proposes to collect panel data on pre-existing businesses in sectors and neighbourhoods in which the new microfranchises will operate, and in comparison sectors and neighbourhoods which will not be in direct competition with the microfranchises.
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第一届GLM|LIC研究网络会议
1. 马达加斯加和塞内加尔的成年过渡:教育、技能和劳动力市场结果:该项目由David E. Sahn (CERDI，康奈尔大学)领导，将分析来自马达加斯加和塞内加尔的长期纵向数据，以研究一群年轻男女向劳动力过渡的动态。研究团队将根据在儿童早期、青春期和成年早期收集的成绩测试分数数据，以及年轻人的非认知技能测量数据，来探索受教育时间与质量、技能和家庭背景以及随后的劳动力市场结果之间的联系。此外，利用关于父母背景以及儿童时期的经济和健康事件的详细信息，研究小组将调查这些因素在多大程度上影响年轻人成年后的福祉，特别是贫困在几代人之间持续存在的机制。
David E. Sahn认为，他们的发现中最显著的是，性格似乎会影响劳动力市场的结果，如果性格不受外部影响，这一发现的政策含义还不够精确，无法做出声明。利用样本个体的祖父母和祖父母的信息，以及童年的家庭和父母的特征，该项目可以开始分析性格特征中有多少可以通过遗传解释，多少可以通过环境解释，多少可以通过两者之间的相互作用解释。
2. B. Kelsey Jack和Felix Masiye(塔夫茨大学，赞比亚大学)将他们的研究重点放在赞比亚的情况上。这个项目粮食约束、产量不确定性与“甘雨”劳动研究小规模农业的情况。目的是确定农业部门短期劳动力的因果影响。该项目的工作将在赞比亚东部省进行一项聚类随机对照试验。作为试验的一部分，随机选择的家庭集群将在农业季节获得现金或玉米贷款。从概念上讲，玉米贷款比现金贷款有三个主要优势:第一，这可以直接解决重点小组中农民提出的外部劳动力供应的主要原因——粮食短缺;第二，该项目团队推测，提供玉米将降低额外资源被用于炫耀性消费的可能性;第三，该团队预计玉米贷款的违约率将大幅降低，因为在收获季节结束时，储存的玉米广泛可用且可观察。比较现金和玉米贷款方案的还款率、劳动力供应和总的经济成果将使工作队能够评估信贷实物性质的重要性。
4. Asim Khwaja(哈佛大学肯尼迪学院)和Jacob N. Shapiro(普林斯顿大学)共同致力于这个项目“旁遮普经济机会计划:评估技能获取和就业市场”该组织关注低收入国家(LICs)的技能发展。这个项目supports the Punjab Economic Opportunities Programme (PEOP) a DfID funded programme being implemented in Punjab, Pakistan, that gathers comprehensive household, employer, trainer and market-level data in order to establish the current level of skill acquisition and take stock of skill mismatches and obstacles faced by individuals in acquiring skills, trainers and employers in providing skills, and employers in effectively utilizing these skills.
5. Nina Pavcnik和Brian Mc Caig(达特茅斯学院，威尔弗里德劳里尔大学)共同参与了这个项目低收入国家的结构变化、国际贸易和劳动力市场:来自越南的证据．本项目的第一部分将使用横跨贸易改革期间的纵向企业调查，研究由美越双边贸易协定(BTA)引起的出口机会对越南企业就业和生产率的影响。
7. Simon Franklin(牛津大学)和Stefano Caria(牛津大学)介绍了他们的项目亚的斯亚贝巴的信息提供和交通券的影响．亚的斯亚贝巴是研究求职成本的理想地点。埃塞俄比亚目前正享受着令人瞩目的经济增长;然而，亚的斯亚贝巴仍然有大量的城市失业者。本研究的首要目的是估计就业干预对从失业到就业的可能性的影响。此外，通过比较治疗的影响，该项目试图揭示是缺乏就业机会的信息，还是更普遍的缺乏进入城市的途径，造成了最大的搜索成本。这应能说明为改善埃塞俄比亚和其他非洲城市失业者就业机会而采取的不同政策是否适当。
